Growing up Catholic, playwright Christopher Durang says, he was haunted by “this thing called ‘Index of Forbidden Books.’

“I don’t know what century it came from,” he tells The Post’s Barbara Hoffman, “but it was said that these were either bad books or misleading ones, and people would need the guidance of the church before reading them.”

Neither the Index nor the nuns at Our Lady of Peace parochial school kept Durang from reading widely as a child –and writing wildly ever after. The award-winning Yale School of Drama grad has trained his absurdist eye on everything from dogma (“Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It all For You”) to dysfunctional family saga (“The Marriage of Bette and Boo”) and film-noir satire (“Adrift in Macao”).

His latest, a tale of homeland insecurity titled “Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,” opens tomorrow at the Public Theater.

Here are a few of the books no one had to torture him to read.

Pale Fire

by Vladimir Nabokov

My sweet but fairly conservative aunt worked in a bookstore and used to hide [Nabokov’s] “Lolita” under the counter so people couldn’t buy it. She hadn’t read it, of course. I had, and when I was at Yale, my friend Albert Innaurato [urged me to read] “Pale Fire,” which starts with a lengthy poem that scared me off. Once he clued me in that the narrator analyzing the poem was crazy, I found it very funny.

The White Hotel

by D.M. Thomas

I went to Germany only once, when my partner at the time had a conference in a small town where no one spoke English. I’d brought “The White Hotel” . . . In the last third, it shifts to the Babi Yar massacre of WW II, and it was devastating. In my new play, something upsetting happens and we go into fantasy because we can’t stand the reality.

My Life and Hard Times

by James Thurber

This is maybe his most famous book — basically a series of autobiographical essays I found very funny as a child. When I was in college and depressed, I started reading it again.

The World According to Garp

by John Irving

I remember strange little things, like the Ellen Jamesians, the society of women who cut out their tongues, and “Beware the undertoad.” In the movie, Glenn Close is luminescent and sensitive, but in the book, the mother’s much more out there. Some of the comedy is in my ballpark.